In another excellent case of "what the frak", Apple has pulled both GV Mobile and VoiceCentral, two applications that add Google Voice support to the phone. Google Voice is one of Google's latest services that provides a sort of virtual switchboard in which you can subscribe all your phones. By calling your GV phone number, all your phones would ring and you can pick it up wherever you happen to be.

The two apps had similar functionality. You could easily start calls, send and read text messages, and check your voice mail messages. This apparently was to close to native iPhone functionality it seems, because that's the reason Apple gave these developers.

To make matters even more bizarre, Google's own GV application was rejected six weeks ago while GV Mobile was PERSONALLY APPROVED BY PHIL SCHILLER, Apple’s senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. Now it got pulled today.

The App Store utter lack of transparency isn't giving much of an answer as to why these apps were pulled. On the phone side of things: these apps just started a call (which you had to answer) so you were still using your own minutes. This wasn't a VOIP service. On the messaging aspect of it, you could indeed send and receive messages, but then again you can do that with one of the dozens of free text messaging apps cluttering the store.

So why was it pulled? Possible native integration in future firmware updates? AT&T leaning on Apple again? Someone drinking a little too much in Cupertino? No one seems to know...

This almost ticks me off enough to leave AT&T. I just got Google Voice #'s for myself and a few friends. One of them has a Blackberry on US Cellular and gets free incoming calls and texts so he can use the Google Voice app and not use any minutes or have any text charges. I was happy with still having to use minutes and pay for the inbound texts until they pulled this crap.

i was just invited to google voice TODAY by Google,
and thankfully I already had the GV application downloaded about one week ago.

Just like stealth, we both barely made it, Stealth made it by just a hair lmao. Well im glad I was invited and already downloaded the app or I would've been SOL too.

Thats really ridiculous for Apple to do. I couldn't see GV being integrated in future firmware upgrades because its too much like the iPhone's features itself. It had to have been something else. If only they accepted Google's version of the app, i think it would have been 10x better than "GV mobile". Thats just too bad though. Its not like Google can really put anything on Cydia either, because they are so tightly knit with Apple. lol that would be kind of hilarious though.

-[r]if you can, please [thank] me if i helped you or you liked what i said! :]

1. This one is obvious, but you can access GV from your phone through Safari and get the mobile version. Let's you read text messages and transcribed voice mails, send text messages, and start calls. It's a bit clunky and not-really-optimized-for-the-iPhone, but it gets the job done.

2. Google Voice has a surprising amount of customization. Be sure to check the advance options under each registered phones for more things. For example, you can set a particular phone (office for example) to only receive Google Voice calls only during the week from 9-5. Inversely, you can set your home phone to only get GV calls during the weekend. You can also disable receiving SMS on a phone if you want to handle GV text messages only through an app/webpage and not take a hit on your actual phone plan's messaging. However, before you go this route, try the next tip.

3. This one is really cool. Even with a fancy app, you still need to answer the call GV makes to you, and then the other line starts ringing, but there's an awesome shortcut for this. Get a friend to text you from his phone (to your GV number, duh). GV will diligently forward that message to your actual phone. This message will arrive from a 406 area code number. That number is unique to the person that sent you the text message!

So by saving and calling back that particular number from a phone you have registered under GV, you're basically telling Google "Hey, this is me. Patch me to X person, please" and skip the entire need of having to start the call through an application. Your friend will receive a call from your GV number without you actually using GV.

It is a bit of a hassle to get all your friends to text your GV the first one, then saving all the 406 numbers, but once you have it saved it's awesome time-saver.

If you can't tell I've been using this service for years now ever since it was GrandCentral :P